I don't get why Nintendo doesn't have a public SDK. Charge for it (e.g. $100 a year), and have an "Indie eShop" along with the "eShop". The open app store models works great for companies that control both hardware and software, and all video game companies fit perfectly in that niche.
It seems that it will be that way soon because MS, Sony, and Nintendo have been increasingly more open to indies in the past decade- for the very good reason that it makes business sense. It'd be very surprising if the trend reversed- and it's surprising that it's taking so long for it to reach its logical conclusion.
Particularly for Nintendo: if they make the 3DS an openly programmable computer with an app store, there could be some very unexpected apps (not video game related) that would open up new revenue streams. I believe that they've been needing that recently, and it seems unlikely that selling plastic figures is more of a viable long term strategy than Zynga freemium crap.
Nintendo like closed - the "Seal of Quality" approval is what they perceive as dragging gaming back out of the Atari-induced crash of '84. Of course it's been 30 years since then, but they're still very hot on control - for example they won't have The Binding of Isaac even though it'd probably sell pretty well because it's "blasphemous".
I don't see it happening, ever, without a major culture shift there.
Nintendo allows games like Senran Kagura to be published on the 3DS, even outside of Japan, so while I'd be happy to be proven wrong, I really doubt that they had any kind of moral dilemma about The Binding of Isaac.
I think you guys are forgetting that Isaac was a Flash game. Porting it to any mobile platform would have required a C or C++ rewrite... which, hey, what do you know, was just released as The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth...
That's a separate issue (from platform control). Nintendo got off of the censorship train in the mid-1990's and haven't looked back, although their own work remains uniformly all-ages friendly with little exception.
Edit: But, I should add that they are going to dictate more terms if they are acting as the publisher, which may be the case with eShop games.
Not the 3DS specifically, but do you mean something like https://wiiu-developers.nintendo.com ? It's a higher-level API than their "native" SDK (which is still only licensed to BigCorps) but Unity and HTML5 aren't bad options for getting something in front of people.
Personally I like Nintendo more for -not- having that garbage. When I buy a Nintendo game I feel more comfortable that it's a real, legit game, not some indie podunk trash.
Take the Steam store for instance, I haven't bought a game from Steam in about 10 months because their home page is littered with Early Access trash.
It really wouldn't fit Nintendo's main audience though. Nintendo is pretty blatant about advertising it's games and consoles for families and younger kids, making it seem like a simpler choice for people who want to buy a console for their children and not worry about it.
They could pull-off an App store like that if they really wanted, but a large portion of their user-base doesn't want such an app store because they wouldn't know what to expect on it. On the other hand while the eShop, 3DS, and WiiU do have some mature titles and garbage titles, they're much easier to avoid, and the 'Nintendo-approved' first-party titles are basically guaranteed to be good buys. More importantly parents really don't have to worry about the content of Nintendo's first-party titles, which is a large reason why so many people buy them.
Nintendo doesn't really want or need indie games. They have always been the all in one company, make the hardware and software, just look at their abysmal third-party support.
Nintendo makes amazing games and people will buy systems just for it, the Xbox One, PS4, and PC are all competing in the same demographic while Nintendo pretty much stands alone.
I know several people (I realise one has to be careful with anicdotes) who have bought their children 2DS/3DSes rather than expose them to the trash pile which is the Apple and Android app stores.
I personally bought a 3DS for myself after a couple of years of just playing mobile games -- there is just too much trash and discovery of any quality games is just too hard. There is far too many mobile "games" designed to provide just enough fun to pursade users to put more money in.
They were locked down very hard with the NDS at the policy level. They didn't lose on content but they did have a lot of problems with piracy. So for Nintendo, experience doesn't suggest they will lose out by being such a closed system.
If anything, they might have drawn the conclusion that they have to lock it down harder. They certainly took that tack with the hardware and code, but I don't know about their current developer policies.
I don't think they'll actually become the loser because of it, but I do think they could get a lot more engagement if they opened things up considerably. I'm not sure what kind of difference that would make, they make a killing on licensing and they probably don't want to risk endangering those profits while they're in the top spot (~45 million 3DS units shipped¹, ~4 million PS Vita².)
Most importantly, Nintendo makes their own hardware primarily for the sake of their own games. Taxing other developers to publish on their platform is a bonus, not their main source of revenue. They're structured such that they can continuously produce games that will confidently sell millions of copies at full retail price, several times a year, and almost never go over budget. They work this way because they've been let down by third parties numerous times in their history, so they don't want to trust the future of their company to anyone but themselves and their most trusted partners.
If that's the way they feel about proven megadevelopers that they've been working alongside for decades, why on earth would they care about unproven indies and the producers of "social" Skinner boxes? They'd have little to gain from the occasional indie hit (Nintendo already lets proven indies onto their eShop), and so much to lose with having to share a marketplace with thousands of glorified slot machines and babby's first helicopter tunnel games and the resulting loss in customer confidence such a change would cause; the second most significant reason that I own a 3DS, after "because I want to play Nintendo's games" is "because I don't have to wade through pages of shovelware to find something good." It feels kinda like how it felt to use Steam before they opened the floodgates to mediocrity with the Greenlight process.
(Similarly, people miss the point when they suggest that they should drop their hardware business and make iPhone games. Putting aside that most of their games simply wouldn't work with touch controls, why on earth would they give up a profitable hardware business, primary promotional status in their marketplace, and a customer base willing to frequently spend full retail price for their games, that will stick with them for a lifetime... and in return get to be in a marketplace where they are just another competitor, where visibility is algorithmically determined, where they are entirely at the whims and mercy of another (notoriously fickle) company, and whose vast majority of users are entitled cheapskates that treat games as 30 second diversions for when you're stuck in a line?)
The other very important reason why Nintendo doesn't want a public SDK is because they were burned horribly by piracy for the DS and Wii. They really don't want to give away devkits to anyone with $100 if it could contribute to the discovery of an unpatchable vulnerability.
Don't get me wrong, it's a little sad to say all of that, because the 3DS is pretty much the only platform other than desktops that I'm actually interested in developing for. I just know that it would be a fatal mistake for Nintendo to shift the focus away from their IPs to being just another platform holder.
Sony used to charge $99 for PSM toolkit for the Vita. Now even that is completely free and anyone can use it. With the introduction of PSM 2.0 there is no RAM/CPU limitation, so you can use the whole power of the console,with the exception being that you are still writing your code in C# which is not going to be the fastest thing in the world. And since the code runs on top of Mono, it has not contributed to any exploit for the Vita. Letting people develop on your console doesn't mean sending them devkits(and 3DS devkits are a horrible piece of hardware to work with,not to mention they cost $1500 each + various licence fees that you have to pay on top of it).
Unfortunately you won't be able to snag a copy easily, apparently this has been out for 3 days.
Interesting watching the supply and demand effects of this. It was a previously unknown 3DS game, ~$5 in whatever your local currency. Now it's $50-100 if you can find it.
I went to download it from the eShop about an hour ago and it said that its currently only available from your local game store. I'm pretty sure that means Nintendo pulled it because of this vulnerability, but hey, I would probably pull it as well if I was Nintendo. I'm curious to see if its available for purchase for other people besides me.
Over a QR code that you scan? I have to express my admiration for the elegance of that exploit. Very nice work.
Nintendo are not going to like it. (However it cannot be used for piracy at the moment; you'd need a user mode -> kernel privilege escalation as well, and no-one's waving one of those around.) It'll be interesting to see what results of this, aside from the price of unpatched versions of Cubic Ninja skyrocketing of course and Nintendo pulling that from the Japanese eShop (according to smea, the only one where it was available?).
This is all really exciting! I order the required game before they get impossible to acquire (maybe I'm already too late, the shop said 3-4 weeks waiting time).
I programmed the GBA as a teenager, and this brings back memories. I'd love for a homebrew scene to grow around the 3DS.
We don't have exact details, but 'cubic ninja' has a fairly extensive level designer, and there is obviously a buffer overflow in the level loading code.
Nintendo is going to patch it eventually and the devs don't want to give them any help and speed it up, we probably won't get a writeup until after it's patched.
It seems that it will be that way soon because MS, Sony, and Nintendo have been increasingly more open to indies in the past decade- for the very good reason that it makes business sense. It'd be very surprising if the trend reversed- and it's surprising that it's taking so long for it to reach its logical conclusion.
Particularly for Nintendo: if they make the 3DS an openly programmable computer with an app store, there could be some very unexpected apps (not video game related) that would open up new revenue streams. I believe that they've been needing that recently, and it seems unlikely that selling plastic figures is more of a viable long term strategy than Zynga freemium crap.